“Think about it,” Rhodes said. “One or both of you had to be in here, unless you’d both stepped into the back room, and I know you wouldn’t stay there for very long. Did anything unusual happen that you can remember?”
The two old men were silent, thinking back to the previous evening. “Seems like things went about as usual,” Lawton said. “I recall Johnny coming in, and we did a little hoorawin’ like we always do, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“No calls came in, I remember that,” Hack added.
Then Lawton snapped his fingers. “We was both in that back room,” he said. “Remember, Hack.”
Hack obviously remembered. He shook his head ruefully. “Couple of dirty old men,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Rhodes asked.
“Well,” Hack said, “Johnny came in and checked the prisoners over, and when he came back down he said he had a copy of one of them men’s magazines, one with some pretty good pictures of some movie star.”
“Wasn’t just some movie star,” Lawton said. “It was that woman in one of them nighttime soaps. Fifty years old, she is, and looks just like a young girl. Hard to believe anybody nearly old enough for me or Hack here could look that good. ‘Course she’d never give one of us a second look, I guess.”
“That’s the truth,” Hack said, “but that’s what it was, Sheriff. We couldn’t of been out of here more than ten minutes, though.”
“Didn’t want one of the registered voters to come in and catch us lookin’ at dirty pictures,” Lawton said apologetically. “Goes to show where that kind of thing gets you, though. That must be when Billy Joe got by us.”
“Hard to believe he’s that smart,”‘ Rhodes said. He didn’t blame the two men for going to look at the magazine. He’d have been tempted himself.
“Maybe he’s smarter than we give him credit for,” Hack said. “Maybe he did kill Jeanne Clinton.”
“Maybe,” Rhodes said. “But I don’t really believe it.”
“Me neither,” Hack said. “It was just a thought.”
“And if he didn’t, who did?” Lawton put in.
“I wish I could tell you,” Rhodes said. “I really wish I could.”
Rhodes reached home during a lull in the thunderstorm, which by then had become what the locals referred to as a real toad strangler. He managed to get from his car to the house with only minor water spotting.
Kathy was in her room, reading probably. Rhodes got ready for bed and turned on his television set in time to catch the last few minutes of Hangman’s Knot, a western with Randolph Scott. Rhodes had always thought that Scott was a fine actor who had never received the recognition he was due. Could anybody name an actor who had consistently done such good work in as many low-budget westerns? Rhodes doubted it. He hoped that Donna Reed appreciated what kind of man she was getting at the picture’s end. He had read somewhere that Scott was still alive and, incredibly, in California, and he hoped that was true. Scott deserved it.
Rhodes lay on his extra-firm mattress and tried to drift off to sleep, but it was impossible. Too many things kept running through his mind. Usually he could go to sleep almost as soon as he lay down, but the murders of Jeanne Clinton and Bill Tomkins had really disturbed him. He kept thinking that he should know more than he did, that he was asking the wrong questions or the wrong people.
He thought about Jeanne. Barrett, Tomkins, and Claymore had all told him the same thing about her-that she was a wonderful girl who just liked to talk, that she was only someone who listened to them. Since only Tomkins seemed to know about the others, they obviously hadn’t gotten together to prepare a story. Maybe they were telling the truth. That made Jeanne Clinton a really rare individual, but it didn’t give anyone a motive to kill her, unless it was her husband.
But Elmer Clinton seemed genuinely grief-stricken over Jeanne’s death. It was almost impossible for Rhodes to believe that Elmer had killed her. He was so incredibly protective of her reputation that he almost certainly would not have killed her, if only to keep her friendships with other men secret. He would have known that the secret would come out in any murder investigation.
Besides, it seemed to Rhodes that Jeanne’s visitors were truly a secret from Elmer, who was shocked and angry about Bill Tomkins’s gossip. He’d heard it, but he apparently hadn’t believed it.
Of course, there was the possibility that one of the men had pressed Jeanne to do more than talk. Barrett certainly had the strength to beat her, for example.
But then, who killed Tomkins? Barrett hadn’t been in his store when Rhodes arrived to call in the word of Tomkins’s death. Where had he been?
And who was the other man that Tomkins had been about to mention when he’d been shot? A few more seconds, and Rhodes would have had himself another suspect, one whose name he couldn’t even guess right now, unless he included Billy Joe, and he still wasn’t ready for that.
Then there was Mrs. Barrett. She was a hardworking woman, no doubt tough as wet leather, but Rhodes couldn’t picture her as the type to beat another woman. That seemed to him a man’s crime, and if that made him a male chauvinist pig, then so be it. He’d just have to suffer the consequences. Even at that, he couldn’t just exclude Mrs. Barrett entirely from his suspects.
When Rhodes finally drifted off to sleep, he dreamed that he was Randolph Scott and that Ivy Daniels was Donna Reed, or maybe it was Jeanne Clinton who was Donna, and Lee Marvin was beating her, and Rhodes was trying to get to him to make him stop, and when he grabbed Marvin’s arm, it wasn’t Marvin who looked back at him but someone else, but Rhodes couldn’t quite make out the face. He woke up the next morning with the dream still vivid in his mind.
Chapter 11
Saturday morning at the Blacklin County jail was pretty much the same as always. A good many drunks were in the cells, but they would all be gone by noon. No other crimes to speak of overnight, unless you counted the poisoned beer.
“Poisoned beer?” Rhodes asked Hack. “That’s a new one on me.”
“New one on all of us,” Hack said. “Jack Turner, down on the Bellem Road, found a six pack of Miller on his front steps about three o’clock when he got in from clubbin’. He figured nobody’d leave a six pack on his porch ‘less there was a good reason. He figured the best reason would be that it was poisoned.”
“Considering how much he’s probably had to drink by that time of the morning, I can see how he might come to that conclusion,” Rhodes said.
“Yeah, I guess,” Hack said. “But I don’t take much to gettin’ woke up at that time of mornin’ to hear some drunk tellin’ me about how somebody is tryin’ to poison him with beer.”
“So what came of it?” Rhodes asked.
“Not much. Turns out some fella down the road from Turner had borrowed a six pack off him a week or so back and just returned it. Since nobody was home, he just left it on the steps. Turner recalled that about the time he got home and called the guy.”
“He come back?”
Hack laughed. “He surely did. He was so afraid we’d send the stuff off to be analyzed that he came back to get it. I ‘spect it’s been drunk by now. Anyway, it’ll never last till night.”
Rhodes agreed. He checked a few reports and decided to take another trip to Thurston. He was just about to leave when Billy Don Painter walked in.
Billy Don Painter was the nearest thing to a hotshot lawyer in Blacklin County. He’d graduated from the law school at Austin and managed to pass the bar on his second try. A couple of times early in his career he’d gotten lucky with juries and managed to get a couple of men off when nearly everyone had thought he didn’t have a prayer. Ever since, he’d had the reputation of the man to get if you were really in trouble or if you wanted to win a big suit.